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Producer Shares Badass ‘Meg’ Concept Art and Maquette from New Line’s Unmade Adaptation

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6 years ago

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One of my big issues with Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg is that the shark is completely indistinguishable from any other movie shark (the movie doesn’t even do a great job conveying its massive size), a bummer given it’s supposed to be a shark the likes of which we’ve never seen on the big screen. In Steve Alten’s novel, the titular beast is eerily albino, but the shark in the film looks like just about every other shark you’ve ever seen in a horror movie. As far as I’ve heard, an all-white shark just didn’t look so good in early CGI tests, so it was scrapped. Sigh.

As Alten recently recounted in a chat with us, the road to getting his Meg on the big screen was an incredibly long and arduous one, with New Line Cinema at one point in charge of adapting his 1997 novel. It was producer Nick Nunziata who spear-headed the project, and Jan De Bont (Twister) was attached to direct for New Line in the early-mid 2000s.

That iteration, of course, was never made, and the rights to the novel eventually reverted back to Alten. After an endless in-development period, Warner Bros. finally made it happen.

Brought to our attention by our friends at Fin Flicks, Nunziata recently shared some concept art and even a maquette of the shark from the early stages of Jan De Bont’s unmade adaptation for New Line, which give us an idea what De Bont had in mind for the film. His version of the shark was to be albino, like the one in Alten’s book, and damn did it look nasty.

“Thirteen years ago I started this machine, going through many evolutions and meetings and people of varying degrees of talent,” Nunziata wrote over on Instagram. “Alas, my gang of folks were shaken off the project and my biggest break as a producer never came to be. I mourn not being able to work with my guys, not my absence from this incarnation of the movie. It certainly is a different film than we were trying to make.“

He added, “I hope ol’ Steve benefits profoundly from it.”

Check out that early art below, along with another piece of concept art we found on Twitter.

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Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

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‘Kraven the Hunter’ Movie Now Releasing in December 2024

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23 hours ago

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April 27, 2024

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Sony returns to their own Marvel universe with the upcoming Kraven the Hunter, which has been bumped all over the release schedule. This week, it’s been bumped once more.

There was a time when Sony was going to unleash Kraven in theaters in October 2023, but the film was then bumped to August 2024. It’ll now release on December 13, 2024.

Kraven the Hunter will be the very first Marvel movie from Sony to be released into theaters with an “R” rating, with lots of bloody violence being promised.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the title character, Marvel’s ultimate predator.

“Kraven the Hunter is the visceral story about how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Set before his notorious vendetta with Spider-Man, Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the titular character in the R-rated film.”

Ariana DeBose will play Calypso in the upcoming Kraven the Hunter movie.

Christopher Abbott (Possessor) is playing The Foreigner, with Levi Miller (Better Watch Out) also on board. Alessandro Nivola (The Many Saints of Newark) will play another villain, but character details are under wraps. Russell Crowe and Fred Hechinger also star.

J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) is directing Kraven the Hunter.

The screenplay was written by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway and Richard Wenk.

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